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Media Business News and Trends

In a world of free content -- from app to university classes from the likes of Princeton and MIT -- the consumer is making out like a bandit, while content producers wring their hands over the prospect of finding a way to make money. Companies are being forced to find new ways to market their services to encourage people to pay. How? Increasingly, it's through customized experiences.

It seems that 2013 is turning out to be a big year for blogs. First, Andrew Sullivan announced he was taking The Dish and leaving The Daily Beast behind to go it alone. Now, Reuters is reporting that tech blog AllThingsD -- run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg -- is in talks with NewsCorp, Inc. about leaving the media giant when AllThingsD's contract is up.

If you are in the business of digital content-and in this day and age, we all are-you have undoubtedly heard the phrase "content strategy" tossed around lately. You've heard how important strategy is to any content endeavor, but you may still be wondering what that means to you.Content strategy defines how a company is going to use content to meet the needs of a business, guides decisions about content from creation to deletion, and sets benchmarks against which to measure success. Deciding to post a YouTube video is not content strategy, nor are the myriad and growing numbers of features that your CMS offers. A strategy sets a vision for the future. Although it can be revised, it is perennial, not seasonal.

Cassey Ho is not your average media mogul. She started out as a Pilates instructor, who used the web as a way to engage with her students by posting workout videos on YouTube. Eventually she started blogging as well, and she developed a following. FITNESS magazine named her the Best Healthy Living Blogger of 2012, and Sharecare called her the second most influential online personality. EContent talked to her about how the web enabled her to turn a passion into a career.

A recent survey discovered that Americans are three times more likely to click on related links at the bottom of an article than content shared on social networking sites.The study, "Behavior Shift: Getting Content in Front of Consumers"-conducted online within the U.S., Oct. 3-5, 2012, among 2,512 adults by Harris Interactive-sought to find out more about the ways in which adults from the U.S. "discover and navigate the Internet's fire hose of content," according to nRelate, a content discovery platform that was behind the study.

It seems that the DOJ's lawsuit against five publishers, which accused them of conspiring to fix ebooks prices using the "agency model" may finally be a thing of the past...sort of. Macmillan, the last holdout in the case, settled with the US Government, filing an agreement. The settlement, however, still needs to be approved by a judge, which has proved problematic in the past.

Five years ago at the inaugural Intelligent Content Conference, there were 35 attendees. The 2013 ICC event, held in San Francisco on February 7 and 8, drew more than three hundred professionals from the disciplines of digital publishing, content management, content marketing, content strategy, mobile communication, and IT. It's as good a sign as any that corporate publishing-that is, businesses outside of traditional publishing using content to drive revenue growth-has moved to center stage.

Even if you don't work in higher education, you're probably aware that most US universities are facing unprecedented challenges, and are, rightly, nervous about their future. The most immediate challenge, strained funding, has been well documented by the media since the recent recession. However, over the past year, a great deal of coverage has also been paid to disruptive models for delivering educational content. Many education experts predict that in the future, these new models will remove students from the traditional college track. This longer-term threat represents a huge concern for higher education administrators, as their approach to learning has been legitimately challenged by innovative solutions ready to meet the huge demand for quality educational content.

Early adopters. We all like to pretend we're one of them. People love to be the first to discover something new: a new band, the latest cool app, the hottest social networking site. In the end though, not everyone can be on the edge of innovation.I always considered myself part of the early adopters group. I'm a "Digital Native" after all, shouldn't I, and my peers, be spearheading the search for the next big thing? I'm not so sure anymore...

Zillow, Inc. is tackling home improvement with the launch of Zillow Digs, a free app available exclusively for iPad and as a web service. With Zillow Digs, home shoppers and homeowners can find visual inspiration and understand the potential cost of remodeling projects. Users can browse tens of thousands of photos and see Zillow's proprietary Digs Estimates for the estimated cost, based on where they live, of the actual bathrooms and kitchens they are viewing. They can create, save, and share Boards of ideas and décor, browse boards created by others, comment on photos, and follow people with similar interests.

ICG Group, Inc. announced that one of its consolidated companies, Channel Intelligence, Inc. ("CI"), has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google Inc. for $125 million in cash. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2013.

Bookish a one-stop online destination designed to connect readers with books and authors, launched, providing visitors with exclusive content and insider access to A-list writers. With the backing of Hachette Book Group, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, as well as the participation of 16 other major publishers, including Random House, Inc., Scholastic, HarperCollins Publishers, and Perseus Books Group, Bookish will provide readers with original and exclusive content about books and writers, while also allowing users to conveniently browse, discover and purchase new reads without leaving the site.

In a post on its website, Payvment announced that it will be joining a new company and shutting down its platform on February 28. The Payvment platform has been used by people selling goods on Facebook. Those people, according to the post, will have one month to transfer their account to Ecwid in order to continue selling on Facebook.

They say the best things in life are free: love, health, happiness--and maybe even software. Indeed, completely gratis open source software (OSS) with no licensing strings attached is all the rage today, as evidenced by the popularity and proliferation of OSS products currently in use, including the Apache HTTP Server, Linux, Android operating systems, internet browser Mozilla Firefox, and ecommerce platform osCommerce.

ProQuest, an information company central to global research, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ebook Library (EBL), which will expand its ebook delivery and aggregation capabilities with libraries worldwide. The acquisition will enable users to discover content across multiple formats including books, journals, dissertations, newspapers, and video. ProQuest acquired ebook pioneer ebrary in January 2011 and plans to combine the strongest features of ebrary and EBL into a single, comprehensive ebook platform once finalized.

With a title like "Catalyst," Zak Greant of Magnolia International Ltd., the company that develops the Magnolia open source enterprise content management system, has a wide-ranging remit. "I focus on community strategy, community development and contributor development," says Greant. "At its core, community work is about people."

Amazon.com, Inc. announced that it has acquired text-to-speech technology company IVONA Software. IVONA delivers the technologies that power the "Text-to-Speech," "Voice Guide" and "Explore by Touch" features on Kindle Fire tablets. Additionally, IVONA delivers text-to-speech products and services for thousands of developers, businesses and customers around the world.

The Boston Globe's longstanding Newspaper In Education (NIE) program is launching a digital pilot program that is putting iPads - as well as digital subscriptions to BostonGlobe.com - into public school classrooms in Boston and Stoneham.

There's a strong case to be made that 2012 was the year Twitter came of age. Founded in 2006, it was one of the earlier Silicon Valley social media Cinderella stories. It overcame a head-scratching premise-remember the days when 140 characters seemed like an impossibly short constraint in which to express oneself?-to become a ubiquitous global channel of information. Twitter is now a de rigueur component of the news media, celebrity entertainment, and even the American political discourse. Think Twitter town hall meetings.

It was a busy month for ebooks, and Ebookworm is taking a look at all the news -- from the Digital Book World Conference to Pew Ereading Report and the controversy over the lack of a digital edition of Robert Jordan's A Memory of Light.

Social media often gets a bad rap as the place where self-involved people go to bore their friends-and sometimes complete strangers--with the mundane details of their day, but recently it helped me save my dog's life.

OpenX Software Ltd., a provider of digital and mobile advertising revenue products and services, announced it has completed a $22.5 million Series E funding round. This brings the total investment in OpenX to more than $70 million. New investor Samsung Venture Investment Corporation led the round. Existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, SAP Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc., and Presidio Ventures also participated in the round. OpenX will use the funds to further accelerate growth, finance additional acquisitions, expand internationally and broaden adoption of its digital revenue platform.

Guy Kawasaki probably needs no introduction, but just for the record, he is the author of 12 books, a former chief evangelist for Apple, and an entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Alltop.com and a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures. And now he is an "artisanal publisher." Kawasaki teamed up with Shawn Welch to write and publish APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. Kawasaki is now a bit of an evangelist for "artisanal publishing" and took the time to answer some of EContent's questions about his book and trends in publishing.

From traditional desktop PCs and laptops to smartphones, tablets, consoles, and interactive TVs, consumers are using more devices than ever before. That puts added pressure on digital content companies (DCCs) to ensure an ideal user experience when people switch between these various screens. As a result, many businesses are turning to responsive web design (RWD), which can create a single source of web content that displays in a readable and relatively controlled way anywhere it's viewed. RWD's single code base delivers to any screen, so that when a change needs to be made to a web page, it only needs to be done once, saving valuable time and money. But while RWD can, under ideal circumstances, adjust your content according to the device and enable more fluid and responsive interaction, it doesn't always work across the board and may not be the best option, especially compared to traditional user experience (UX) design, some experts say.

TEMIS, a provider of semantic content enrichment solutions, is announced the Luxid Community Platform will be going into open beta this month. The Luxid Community Platform is an online collaboration platform where semantic content enrichment practitioners can meet their peers, exchange best practices, share information extraction components, and accelerate their projects. TEMIS will unveil the Luxid Community Platform in four dedicated events in New York, Berlin, Paris, and London starting January 29, where TEMIS customers and partners will be invited to join the platform and help further shape its directions.